“So how is this legal?”

The reason for the question is obvious. John Kissel has been in the CT State Senate since 1993. He’s one of the most senior Republicans in the Capitol. He also happens to be a corporate attorney for Eversource, the monopoly utility that sends electric bills to most of CT.

It seems like the type of thing that should be illegal. Or at least the kind of thing that would trigger a new ethics rule. Eversource isn’t a random private employer. It’s the regulated utility that most Connecticut residents have to use. They lobby the legislature just as much as anyone. They fight with PURA (the state’s utility regulator).

So the Reddit question makes a lot of sense. How is this legal?

The state wrote it this way. Under CT’s ethics statute, a legislator only has a “substantial” conflict of interest when a piece of legislation would financially benefit the legislator, a family member or a “business with which he/she is associated.”

That sounds broad until you read the definition, a “business with which he is associated” doesn’t include a legislator’s regular employer.

And this is the whole ballgame.

If a lawmaker owns part of a company, directs the company or has specific leadership ties to it, that can create a conflict of interest. If the lawmaker just works at the company, the rule gets much softer.

This isn’t my take on it, either. 9 years ago, the Office of State Ethics told then State Senator George Logan that Aquarion, his employer, wasn’t technically a “business with which you are associated” under the law.

They said Logan could vote on legislation affecting Aquarion, as long as the bill didn’t directly put cash into his own pocket or the pocket of an immediate family member. They also said he could vote on budget, bond or tax packages even if they included things specifically benefiting Aquarion.

This is how Connecticut currently handles conflicts. The question isn’t whether your employer has major business before the state. It’s whether the vote creates a direct financial benefit to you personally. This is an extremely narrow standard.

Mark Pazniokas of the CT Mirror had the cleanest take on this in 2020: “Nothing in Connecticut’s narrowly drawn ethics rules bar legislators from voting on matters that help or harm their employers.”

Which brings us back to Senator Kissel.

It appears Kissel has been careful. He’s not on the Energy and Technology Committee, which would be a major conflict of interest. He does typically recuse himself from energy bills, even though he’s not required to do so.

In 2020, when a big storm hit and there was public anger over outages and rate increases, he voted for the utility accountability bill. “This doesn’t benefit my employer and my constituents spoke with one, loud voice, especially after the rates went up.”

This actually matters. This piece isn’t about how Kissel got caught doing something illegal. There’s no ethics finding or investigation that I’m aware of. He may well be acting in good faith.

But this is the crux of the problem. The system depends on him acting in good faith.

Senator Kissel is a senior member of the Regulations Review Committee, which reviews state agency regulations before they go live. That includes regulations from PURA, the agency that regulates Eversource.

So even if Kissel avoids the committee that writes Connecticut’s energy policy, he still sits near the machinery that turns PURA regulations into state rules.

Again, this is 100% legal and Kissel was not the only one.

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From 2017-2020, 3 GOP senators had direct professional ties to Eversource or a subsidiary while serving in the legislature. As noted, Kissel works as a corporate attorney for Eversource. Kevin Witkos, then the deputy minority leader, worked for Eversource as a community relations specialist. Logan worked for Aquarion, owned by Eversource.

They weren’t sitting around killing bills. The point is more basic than that. Eversource had people in the building.

Democrats have their own versions of this too. This isn’t a story about one clean party and one dirty party. Eversource’s bench in Hartford has been mostly Republican, this is also true.

The question normal people are really asking isn’t whether every vote is dirty or whether every lawmaker is corrupt. They want to know if they can trust the system.

I don’t think they can, specifically when it comes to Eversource.

In 2023 and 2024, the company spent around $1.3M lobbying Hartford. Eversource and United Illuminating sued PURA Chair Marissa Gillett last year. The Eversource CEO announced $500M in Connecticut spending cuts the same morning Governor Lamont reappointed Gillett to PURA, blaming a hostile regulatory environment.

Lamont was spot on when describing the campaign against Gillett: “There’s a full-court press to get her out of there… I mean the lobbyists, the publicists, the lawyers.”

I’m not the first person to call all of this out. In 2020, Peter Lewandowski (then director of the Office of State Ethics) proposed requiring lawmakers to file a written disclosure when they voted on something affecting their employer. It didn’t even stop them from voting but at least it was something.

But even that bill died in committee.

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Common Cause Connecticut has been trying for years to get the legislature to address this and tighten these rules… but the proposals go nowhere.

Massachusetts has a different standard. Their ethics law treats a business where a lawmaker serves as an employee as a potential conflict. So the thing Connecticut carved out, Massachusetts wrote in.

The Reddit user asked the right question. “How is this legal?” It’s because CT lawmakers made it legal and then they left it that way.

The next time your Eversource bill jumps, you can get mad at the company and the politicians who keep insisting that the system works.

But keep in mind that Connecticut has a system where a state senator can work for a monopoly like Eversource, sit close to the regulatory process and still be following the rules.

The rules are the problem.

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The CEO of the most valuable company on the planet wasn’t on the list.

Jensen Huang of Nvidia had been left off. Reporting suggested it would’ve complicated talks with Xi around AI export controls.

But by Tuesday afternoon, the situation changed. On Tuesday night, Huang was trotting across the tarmac in Alaska, boarding Air Force One as it refueled. Then the president posted on Truth Social that Jensen was onboard.

This image tells you everything you need to know about the relationship between the US government and corporate power in 2026.

Trump landed in Beijing on Wednesday at exactly 8:08pm local time. This timing was chosen because 8 is the luckiest number in Chinese culture.

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He got a warm reception with a red carpet, military band and hundreds of Chinese school children waving American and Chinese flags in carefully synchronized motions.

The president came down the stairs and introduced the delegation like a billionaire at Sun Valley introducing friends at breakfast. And standing right behind them was the man who had caught the flight in Alaska 12 hours earlier, backpack still slung over his shoulder, while Elon stood there in black and Tim Cook in a suit.

Executives have traveled with presidents before, it’s not new. The old separation between political power and corporate power has evaporated. The CEOs aren’t waiting outside the room anymore. In many cases, they’re calling the shots.

In 1938, FDR put Thurman Arnold in charge of antitrust in the DOJ. Arnold treated concentrated corporate power as something to confront, not console.

This version of Washington, DC feels very far away.

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Jensen Huang caught Air Force One in Alaska because he’s got business to handle in China.

All over America this morning, people opened utility bills, filled their gas tanks and just kind of absorbed it, because what else are they supposed to do?

One group gets a flight on Air Force One. The other gets told the bill is due.

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For most of the last decade, these weren’t the type of stories you’d hear about Erin Stewart.

You heard about the 26-year-old wunderkind when she won. You heard about the Republican winning in a Democratic city, the daughter of a former mayor, who was blunt and telegenic. You heard that she could be the future of the Connecticut GOP. The New York Times profiled her. She had the kind of coverage that turns local politicians into stars.

But the crack was there if you looked. In 2018, when she made her first moves towards statewide office, she finished a distant second for the lieutenant governor nomination at the GOP convention. The reporters and power brokers pontificating about her rise were never quite the same people voting in Republican primaries.

Last month, the Mirror reported that Stewart had asked New Britain for a partial pension benefit that the city charter doesn’t include. She actually wrote to HR herself: “Based on my 14 years of service, I calculate my eligibility for a deferred partial pension benefit of approximately 35% of my annual salary, payable upon reaching the eligible age of 55.”

The city has no such benefit for someone with under 20 years of service.

When asked why she made the request, she told the Mirror, "Why wouldn't I?"

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The whole aura around Stewart rested on competence. In a state this small, reputations compound slowly over time and collapse all at once.

Connecticut only has 169 towns and maybe 400 people or so who actually run its politics. Most of them have known each other for decades. Stories travel quietly for a long time before they hit the public.

Before Republican primary voters started drifting to the state senator from Greenwich, New Britain already had their own verdict on Stewart. Her hand-picked successor lost to Bobby Sanchez last November. Mayor Sanchez is the one who hired the law firm and released the records.

We’re only hearing about this stuff now because the city she ran for 12 years is no longer run by her people.

Erin Stewart’s argument was competence. Her proof was New Britain. And now New Britain is the source of the questions.

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Last year, the Senate passed a real AI bill with teeth and the House just let it sit there until the session ended. There was no vote, it just disappeared. It’s a pattern you see more than you think.

But today, the House passed SB5 anyway… 131 to 17.

And now it goes to Governor Ned Lamont, who’s expected to sign it.

For the first time, Connecticut actually gets an AI law through both chambers. This is a huge moment.

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The story doesn’t end here, though.

Big Tech is already pushing back. Just this week, a trade group sued the state of Minnesota over a similar law. There’s also talk of a federal preemption from the Trump administration that would entirely wipe out all state laws on this issue.

But today the bill passed. Now we’ll see if it sticks.

More soon.

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The House never even voted on it. It just sat there until the session ended. Then it was gone.

This isn’t a fluke. This happens way more than people realize. And now, it’s happening again.

A few weeks ago, the Senate passed SB 5. It’s a bigger bill this time and you can feel the compromise in it. The edges softened and new pieces were added. It looks like something that’s been massaged, not something that came out clean the first time. But it’s still real and it would change things in a real way.

It’s sitting in the Connecticut House with no vote scheduled. The session ends on May 6.

I reached out to Senator Maroney, one of the architects of the Senate bill, this week to get a read on what happens next. If his office responds, I’ll update this piece.

That’s part of the reality here too. Even if you’re paying attention and following closely, it’s not always clear who’s making the calls or what’s actually happening behind the scenes.

What the bill does is straightforward, once you strip it down.

It creates an AI policy office and an AI workforce academy inside the state government. Essentially, the state is attempting to get its arms around something it knows is already here.

It puts new rules around how AI gets used, especially with kids. Chatbots, social media and the whole blurry category of things where everyone agrees there’s a problem but no one agrees on how to deal with it or where the line is.

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The part that stuck with me most is the hiring piece. The bill treats algorithmic hiring as something that could cross into civil rights territory. It also prohibits AI from interfering with state employee union collective bargaining agreements. This is the kind of thing that shows up in someone’s real-life job search or workplace.

If the bill dies, all of that will go with it. It won’t be revised later or delayed. Just gone.

You can argue that this bill is messy. It is.

You can argue that it’s trying to do too much. Maybe it does.

But it’s also one of the more serious attempts that Connecticut (and most states) have made to deal with this at all. And right now, the pattern looks familiar.

The Senate does the work. Then the House decides whether anything happens.

One thing I’ve learned is that most bills don’t get voted down. They just never come up at all.

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So the real question isn’t really what’s in SB 5. It’s whether it gets a vote at all.

This decision sits somewhere in the CT House leadership. The Speaker or the people around him. I don’t know who exactly makes that call. This is kind of the point.

It’s also been interesting to look at who showed up around last year’s bill that stalled and failed.

Lobbyists, tech companies, the usual players. More on this to come.

For now, it’s much simpler. There’s a bill and a deadline. And there’s a pattern that says if nothing happens, the bill will disappear.

Update: On May 1, 2026, the Connecticut House passed this legislation.

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That’s a different experience. On one side, OpenAI is laying out how AI will reshape work, prosperity and society. Wealth will concentrate, governments will misuse the technology, etc. It’s all there very plainly.

They actually get it. Pretty swiftly, this went from being a product story and started looking like a power and control story.

On the flip side, Farrow’s reporting includes direct accounts from ex-employees of OpenAI who questioned whether leadership was being fully candid internally at key moments. You can’t really separate this.

In the policy paper, they keep coming back to the New Deal. This is the analogy they want: a big shift, a country adapting, new systems being built, spreading the wealth.

But let’s actually sit with that.

The New Deal wasn’t a conversation or a document. It was a fight against power and entrenched interests. The government stepped in because concentrated power started to distort everything in its path. They built agencies that could actually enforce things. They backed labor and broke up monopolies.

They didn’t ask the OpenAIs of that time to write the rules. This is the part that matters.

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Because what’s happening now is different. OpenAI is essentially saying: we see the risks, we agree that things need to change and here’s a vision for how it should work.

Some of it is legit, specifically the parts where they acknowledge and describe how disruptive this technology will be.

The rest is where it gets cleaner and more manageable. The kind of solutions that don’t box them in. They’re getting ahead of the solutions that don’t inherently benefit them.

If you’re in control of something this powerful, you don’t design rules that meaningfully limit you. You design rules that look reasonable on the surface but benefit you in ways that normies can’t see.

And this isn’t unique to OpenAI, this is how incentives work.

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There are many parts of their document that are serious. The Public Wealth Fund idea, not because it’s ready to go tomorrow but because it says something most companies would avoid.

They essentially say that if this works, the upside will concentrate. A few companies will hold a lot of the value. Everyone else gets it downstream.

Same for the tax section. They’re admitting that the current tax system won’t hold if income shifts away from labor and toward capital.

The paper’s safety net ideas are more responsive than what I’d expect, calling for support ramping up when disruption spikes, then pulling back when things stabilize.

This tells me they’re planning for disruptions and don’t expect smooth sailing.

The bigger gap is what they don’t touch.

I’ve spent most of my career inside of the attention economy. I’ve seen what happens when content gets cheaper to produce and easier to distribute. I’ve seen the incentives bend in real time.

AI brings this dynamic to another level. These systems generate text, images and video. This is the raw material of how people understand what’s happening. And now these systems can generate content instantly, at scale.

The policy paper talks about trust, verification and democratic values… but stays at a high level.

We know where this goes. Content gets cheaper… a lot cheaper. It gets easier to target, tweak and flood every platform with slightly different versions of the same message until nobody is quite sure what’s real anymore or what matters.

We’ve seen a smaller version of this with social media. That seemed massive but was a baby step compared to what’s coming.

And everything else they’re talking about in the paper (accountability, oversight, input from normal people) depends on all of us agreeing what’s real in the first place.

This is the part OpenAI mostly skips.

They talk a lot about success and making sure people have access to AI. The words “affordable,” “widespread,” and “something like a right” are peppered throughout.

And this stuff is important… but access isn’t control.

They’ll allow everyone access but still have the power to make all of the decisions: how it’s built and behaves and how value flows. All of this to be controlled by a small handful of companies.

It’s not about access, it’s about who has the power to decide. It’s the difference between being a user and having power.

The “Right to AI” idea blurs this line. It sounds like a public good but it also expands the customer base for the people building these tools. Both things can be true.

Some of the rest feels familiar.

Governance ideas that sound solid until you ask who actually enforces them. Public input that feels more like being heard than having power. Auditing that focuses on only the highest-end systems, which makes sense until you realize that’s not where most of the risk sits.

Nothing in this policy paper is crazy… but that’s almost the point.

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And then there’s where this actually lands. Not in DC but in states, schools, hospitals and municipal budgets.

These places are already trying to figure out what this will mean for jobs, energy and what gets built next.

States like Connecticut are already in the thick of it. Bills moving, Silicon Valley lobbying money showing up, rules getting shaped before most people are even paying attention.

Corporations are spending real money to influence how the AI rules land. It’s not theoretical, it’s the ground game being played right now.

And it’s happening below the level OpenAI’s policy paper was written for.

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Sam Altman and OpenAI understand how big this is.

They’re also the ones closest to the center of it. They’re putting the first version of the rules on the table.

But this only works if they’ve built up a certain level of trust.

They’d need to be straight about the risks, follow through on constraints and help design something that doesn’t just entrench them further.

The funny thing is, the argument inside OpenAI (not that long ago) wasn’t about policy. It was a fight about whether the people in charge were being fully candid about what was happening inside of the company.

It’s impossible not to allow this to change how you read everything else.

The New Deal didn’t work because people trusted the right executives. It worked because it didn’t need that.

It built systems that could actually check power. It didn’t ask companies at the center of it to write the rules.

This time, they are.

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Max Stahl thinks you’re asking the wrong question.

I first met Max Stahl in June 2007. We were living in the same dorms in Manchester, NH, part of a group of two dozen Obama for America interns canvassing towns where most people didn’t know who Obama was.

We’d go door to door in Bedford and Amherst (and other towns) carrying supporter cards, competing to see who could get more voters to commit to Obama.

Max always won. He had this money-and-politics pitch that worked like a charm, even then. He dropped out of college to work on Obama’s Nevada operation, eventually went back to school and has never really left politics.

I went into media. We’ve stayed in touch ever since… and money in politics has been the thread I’ve kept pulling on because I think most of our other problems trace back to it.

Everyone knows money runs politics. But almost nobody has a clear idea what to do about it.

Every reform idea in the last 30 years has had the same issue. Disclosure requirements: the money found a way around it. Public financing: popular, bipartisan but never implemented at scale.

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Money in politics is like water through rocks. You plug one hole and it finds another. Always has.

Max has spent 20 years inside this fight. In 2014, he ran a campaign on college campuses with interns making $1,500 a semester and no marketing budget. He had one goal: get presidential candidates to sign a one-line pledge to take big money out of politics.

Hillary Clinton, whose donor network was the very thing they were fighting, never officially signed. But by the end, the Democrats’ platform at the 2016 convention had his language in it anyway.

Max has watched that water long enough to know where the real crack is. When I spoke with him recently, he said something that reframed the Citizen United debate for me.

The conventional take is that CU opened up the floodgates (more money, worse politics).

Before Citizens United, even the most corrupt power centers had real constituencies. When the auto industry or oil companies did well, their workers did well, their states did well. Michigan felt the success when Detroit did. The people in the smoky back room, as Max puts it, “when they did well, they brought a lot of people with them.” It wasn’t some noble exercise, the constituencies forced their hand.

Citizens United changed who was at the table. Now you can have a single anonymous individual, no company, no workers, no factories, no real constituencies anywhere, buying as much influence as the auto industry once could.

You don’t know who these people are. You have no idea what they want. And their interests don’t have to align with anyone’s but their own.

This is why every fix aimed at “less money” keeps failing and won’t work.

So here’s where Max’s landed after 20 years of doing this.

We didn’t ban cigarettes. We heavily taxed them and used that money for the public good. Lottery tickets fund local schools. Sin taxes exist because we decided certain behaviors, while legal, should carry a public cost.

What if we applied the same logic to political donations?

Small donations would remain untouched: you and I give $25, it’s not taxed. But once you start spending big money, a progressive tax kicks in.

Hit $10K and you’re taxed at 100%. $20K, you’re paying 200%. Want to spend $10M on a race? Now it costs you $250M.

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You can still spend the money, you just can’t profit from it.

We’ll never be able to remove the incentive… but we can change the cost. Right now, political spending is the best investment a billionaire can make. A $3.5K max donation to a congressional candidate (“cheap dates” as Max calls them), buys access. Access becomes information. Information becomes a market edge.

Max described a trade placed 15 minutes before Trump announced a “peace deal” with Iran, billions in calls timed to the announcement. The market surged.

You and I can’t make bets like that. The people with the right cell phone numbers can.

Let’s flip this math. Make the cost of buying influence so punishing that the ROI disappears. It won’t be illegal, just expensive enough that it stops making sense.

Where should this money go? Max has two ideas:

1. Fund public financing so candidates without billionaire backing can compete.

2. Send checks directly to people.

Max’s girlfriend was canvassing in Detroit for Kamala Harris in the days before the 2024 election. She knocked on a door in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. The person answered the door and quickly said they were voting for Trump.

She asked why: “Trump sent me a check. No other politician’s ever done anything for me.”

People remember when the government does something for them. It’s very sticky and it shapes how people vote.

Sin tax revenue could be a player in this. Not just a funding mechanism but a tangible signal every 2-4 years of how much the game is being played… and who gets cut in.

In 2007, we were 20 years old knocking on doors in New Hampshire for a candidate nobody believed in yet. Back then, Max was already better at the pitch than I was. He’s been refining it ever since.

Our system runs on incentives. This is one of the few ideas that actually changes them.

Not by stopping the money. By making it too expensive to matter.

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What happens when the economy keeps growing… but fewer people are needed to run it?

And I don’t mean in some far off, fantasy, sci-fi sense. I mean it in a very real, measurable way. You can already see it in hiring trends, earnings reports, and how work is quietly being reorganized right now.

Output goes up, revenue holds and over time, the number of people required to sustain that output starts to drift downward. It’s not a hypothetical anymore, it’s a direction.

The discourse on AI is stuck in two places that don’t really connect.

On one side, there’s the optimists who talk about AI tutors for every child, exponentially faster drug discovery and a more productive economy. Some of this will be true.

On the other side, you’ve got the doomers. Job loss, misinfo/disinfo, moving towards a world that no one can define but everyone gestures towards.

Both sides are reacting to real things. But neither is talking about the structure of the economy itself and that’s where it’s starting to get uncomfortable.

Whether AI is “good” or “bad” avoids the massive question underneath it: what happens to the economy when it no longer depends on us, people, in the same way?

Last week, Tristan Harris was on Bill Maher’s show and got closer to this question than most coverage out there.

Maher asked what most of us assume. Isn’t this just about money? Subs, ads, the same old incentives we saw during the advent of the internet and social media.

But Harris pushed back and his answer is worth sitting with:

“If you get all the ChatGPT subscriptions, that doesn’t add up to paying off the amount of debt that they’ve taken. If you get all advertising in the world, that wouldn’t pay off the amount of debt that they’ve taken. The only thing that justifies the amount of investment… is to build artificial general intelligence… to be able to replace every human worker in the economy.”

AI is going to be (and already is) a huge business. Subs, ads, enterprise… all of this is real.

What Harris is getting at is that even this gargantuan business model might not be enough. The scale of investment is so enormous and the returns investors are expecting don’t line up with the productivity gains and improved software tools that are on the horizon.

And once we take that seriously, the implication is straightforward. They’re not just building technology to help people work. They’re building systems that reduce how many people are needed in the first place.

This isn’t a conspiracy. This is where the incentives lead.

There’s an old concept in economics called the resource curse. You often see it in countries rich in oil or minerals. The wealth is real, oftentimes massive, but it changes how their economies work. Instead of depending on people to generate value, the system depends on extraction. Governments invest in infrastructure and production, not in their people. Incentives always win.

Over time, the relationship between the economy and people moves. Slowly at first, then quickly.

AI creates a version of this dynamic for advanced and mature economies. You could call it an intelligence curse. When more of your economic output comes from machines vs. people, the incentives move in that direction. It moves towards energy, infrastructure and compute. And moves away from labor.

What does this look like in practice? It won’t look like a collapse or a sudden wave of unemployment that we can point to.

It looks like companies getting more efficient, producing more with fewer people. Margins improving and growth continuing to go up.

At the same time, headcount goes down. Entire categories of work get compressed. Fewer new roles open up to replace the old ones.

Corporate tax revenues can hold up in this environment. But income tax is another story. Eventually, that will start to soften and the effects will show up locally.

There will be less municipal spending, property values go down. It’ll be small shifts at first, followed by more noticeable ones.

It’s a strange kind of divergence. The economy looks healthy from the top down but feels different on the ground. The economy works, but fewer people do.

This part is easy to miss. This isn’t just about being unemployed. It’s about losing your place in society and in how the economy functions.

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Where might this show up first?

Finance, insurance, law, media, consulting. These kinds of roles have been seen as stable for a long time. High-skill, high-wage jobs that sit at the center of how the modern economy runs.

And people in these roles are supporting local systems all around them: housing markets, public schools, small businesses, local tax revenues.

The parts of the economy that we think of as the strongest right now might actually be the most exposed.

If you look at how policy is responding, it’s mostly focused on the surface. Privacy rules, deepfakes, guardrails around how AI is used. All of this matters, but it just doesn’t touch the core issue.

The real shift is happening underneath. It’s about how output relates to labor. How growth relates to real people. I’ve yet to see a plan for this. Not on the state level or federally.

There’s no playbook we can cite for when a tax base built on human income starts to fade away from the economy generating that income.

Currently, we’re mostly reacting to what AI does and not preparing for what it changes.

Maybe things will move slower than it feels. Maybe there are limits that we’re not seeing yet that keep more people in the system. I don’t know.

But the direction isn’t subtle. This isn’t a dramatic “machines take over” story… it’s much quieter than that. This is about incentives shifting, bit by bit, away from real people.

Once this shift sets in, it’ll be nearly impossible to unwind it.

The economy probably won’t break. It’ll just stop needing all of us.

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A lot has changed since then.

Sean is now Connecticut’s Comptroller, the state’s CFO and one of the first millennials elected to statewide office here. I’ve spent the last decade working inside digital media and the platform economy watching how Big Tech reshapes industries from the inside.

My experience is part of why I wanted to talk to him. Sean’s office has been quietly doing some of the most interesting work in the state right now on a question I think about every day.

What happens to Connecticut’s economy when AI starts hitting the industries we depend on?

The answer, based on the convo I had with Sean, is that the shift is already underway. Most people just haven’t processed what it means yet.

The immediate picture has enough chaos on its own. Tariffs bouncing around. A war in Iran pushing energy costs even higher. The state’s surplus shrinking faster than expected. Sean spends a lot of time talking with businesses that can’t plan more than a few weeks ahead.

“I spoke to a big employer last week who said their world was rocked by the original Liberation Day tariffs,” he told me. “They changed all their supply chains. Then boom this happens. Now they have no idea what to do strategically because the fate of these things is so up in the air.”

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People are feeling this instability directly. Gas prices have jumped since the war started and heating oil has climbed by more than a dollar a gallon in some places. But underneath the daily whiplash, something bigger is happening.

CT ranks 9th nationally in employment directly affected by AI. The sectors most exposed, insurance, health care, finance and higher ed, are not just industries here. They’re a tax base. When those industries change, CT changes.

Sean’s office has been looking at this closely. The way he frames it cuts through a debate that usually gets stuck in abstractions. People tend to ask whether AI will replace jobs or simply make workers more productive.

Sean thinks that question misses the point.

“I don’t know that we have all the answers. But that replace versus augment question is probably a thin line. And I think it is our job to plan for both realities, not one or the other.”

“You can live in your parents’ basement and pay your student loans and you can have a job at Travelers,” he said. “But if you don’t have the job at Travelers you are just living in your parents’ basement with a lot of debt working suboptimal jobs for the debt ratio you have.”

The first rung of the ladder matters a lot more than people realize. When it weakens, a lot more starts to wobble.

It’s not hard to imagine where this goes. More skepticism about college. More pressure on universities whose business models are already shaky. A long overdue shift towards workforce training that doesn’t require a 4-year degree.

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Then there’s the infrastructure problem. AI data centers use an insane amount of electricity. They consume electricity equivalent to about 100K homes. Some of the newest facilities require even more than that.

CT’s notoriously high electricity prices may have slowed the rush of these projects starting here. Sean mentioned it with almost a laugh. The same energy bills that piss off residents every month have accidentally shielded the state from some of the pressures other states and regions are already dealing with.

But this won’t last.

“They will come and they are coming because the world is heading in this direction,” Sean said. “I just think we need to be more thoughtful about it.”

Sean pointed to the work state senator James Maroney has been doing on AI policy as the kind of approach that makes sense. Not banning the new technology. Not pretending it can be stopped. But setting legitimate and thoughtful rules for how it arrives.

Near the end of our conversation, I asked Sean what people in CT aren’t paying enough attention to.

“60-70 years ago a town’s value was if they had a giant factory with a smokestack that employed a thousand people. Now in some office park three workers could be working on something that changes the world generating massive amounts of GDP that nobody knows about.”

This gets at something easy to miss about the modern economy. The places creating the most value often don’t look like the big employers people still imagine when they think about the economy.

These days a small team in a quiet office park (sometimes even a solo entrepreneur) ends up building software that shapes entire industries.

A lot of what people still picture when they think about CT’s economy doesn’t look like that. But more and more of what matters does. This disconnect matters politically.

If leaders are still planning for the economy people remember vs. the one that’s forming in front of all of them, they will keep solving yesterday’s problems.

Sean believes CT may finally be in a position to think about the future differently.

A decade ago, the state was dealing with a debt and budget crisis. The last 10 years have been about digging out of that hole, one day at a time. Now, roughly $10B in debt has been paid down. The rainy day fund is bigger than anyone could’ve anticipated.

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“We spent the last ten years getting out of a fiscal mess,” Sean said. “For the first time we are above water and we can do innovative things.”

For the first time in a long time, CT has some room to think beyond the next fire drill.

This doesn’t guarantee success but it does mean CT has something it has not had in years: the ability to think about where the economy is going before it gets there.

AI adoption is accelerating rapidly and hiring trends are already shifting. Big decisions on electricity infrastructure and data centers will shape our grid for decades.

CT spent the last 10 years proving it could stabilize the state’s finances. The next decade will test something harder.

Can the state recognize the economy forming around it before it is too late to shape it? Based on this conversation at least one statewide officeholder is taking that question seriously.

The state could use a few more.

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On March 2, CNN ran a segment on the latest from Iran with the line that “the big wave is yet to come.” They ran it continuously as breaking news. The focus wasn’t on what happened but the escalation coming imminently.

Later on that day, Anderson Cooper opened a special edition with rapid fire montage of missile strikes and explosions, all before any talk of what the operation’s objectives were.

The following morning, CNN’s morning coverage introduced the conflict “day four of the war with Iran.”

That framing matters. It shows that CNN has adopted the war’s internal clock as an organizing structure of its coverage. The story becomes the war’s momentum. What comes next? How does the escalation unfold? How intense will the next phase be?

This isn’t the same thing as covering the war’s progress. These are different editorial choices.

One of the voices on CNN explaining the war to viewers has been retired Admiral James Stavridis.

He appeared on CNN three times within eight days: February 25, March 1 and March 5. The retired admiral analyzed new developments in the conflict. Each TV appearance introduced him as an executive at the Carlyle Group.

Carlyle owns ManTech, a US defense contractor whose work mainly includes military and intel services.

CNN discloses Stavridis’ role at Carlyle but viewers are not told about the deeper web of financial connections.

And this isn’t unusual. Retired generals are widely used as analysts on TV. Their credentials are real and their access to military thinking and sources are legitimately valuable.

Their financial relationships with defense contractors are also public information and appear in corporate disclosures. But on TV, these connections never get mentioned.

Looking back, the cleanest example of how this coverage works came on a March 4th segment.

Former CNN correspondent Reza Sayah (in Tehran) was back on the network reporting on the site of a strike on an elementary school. He said the building was obliterated. He described children being pulled from the rubble.

They then cut to anchor Erin Burnett interviewing Ophir Falk, Benjamin Netanyahu’s foreign policy advisor. Burnett asked him about the strike.

Falk responded with certainty, claiming that the school was struck by an Iranian missile misfire. Burnett pushed back once, noting that the US military hadn’t claimed that and that early findings revealed that American forces were operating in that area.

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Then the segment ended. The claim that Iran had bombed its own school went out to millions of viewers.

The next day, the New York Times published a deep, visual investigation into the strike. They used geolocated video, satellite imagery and verified photos from the scene and concluded that the school was hit at the same time as nearby buildings housing an IRGC naval facility.

The Times looked into the misfire theory and experts said the pattern of damage was inconsistent with a single errant missile.

An Israeli official made an unverified claim during breaking coverage. Erin Burnett briefly noted counter-evidence. The show moved on.

Just a day later, one of the top investigative teams in journalism assembled satellite imagery and expert analysis that pointed in the opposite direction.

I haven’t seen one segment revisiting it. There’s no malice. This is simply how the coverage works.

The segment is part of a broader pattern. Across CNN’s coverage, the dominant framing of the war is operational: what was hit? What missile is coming next?

These questions are fair during a war. But other questions appear far less often… and they have answers.

In one segment, University of Chicago professor Robert Pape offered a very different warning. After studying more than 100 years of air campaigns, he said the US may be entering an “escalation trap.”

He said that attempting to bomb regimes into submission has “never worked in 100 years.”

The US, he said, may now be going “up against the weight of history.”

At what cost?

Pentagon officials have estimated that the war is burning through roughly $1 billion a day. That number rarely gets on CNN (or Fox News or MS Now for that matter). The escalation ladder does.

What does winning actually require?

When the strike on the elementary school emerged, it was the New York Times, not CNN, that did the painstaking work analyzing satellite images to understand what actually happened.

Reporting like this requires time and investment in specialized staff and resources. Live TV is running on a different clock and incentive structure.

The result is the escalation ladder that is their war story’s spine. Accountability will arrive later, if at all.

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There’s another gap in the coverage. The same people asked to analyze the war on TV are the same types: retired generals, ex-administration officials, etc. The people fighting the war are somewhere else.

The 103rd Airlift Wing is based in East Granby, CT. The state has roughly 8,000 National Guard members.

They’re not career military. When they deploy their lives do not pause.

The escalation calendar will keep turning. There will be new strikes, new briefings, new analysts explaining what the new phase might look like.

The investigation into the school is still unfolding.

The 103rd Airlift Wing is still based at East Granby. They’ll report to duty when called. And CNN will cover the next phase.

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This sentence should stop you.

This isn’t $65M in lobbying or campaign contributions from employees who happen to work for the company. Sixty five million dollars, from the company itself, wired through 4 new super PACs. The PACs will dominate state legislative races in Texas, Illinois, California and wherever else Mark Zuckerberg decides his interests are threatened.

The money starts flowing this week. Texas early voting just started.

A corporation spending money on elections like this isn’t new. Energy companies do it, big pharma too. Real estate companies and unions do their share. This is the world we live in post-Citizens United.

What’s new now is the target.

There are around 7,400 state legislators across the country. Most are part-time and raise less than $100K for their campaigns. A competitive state house race costs $300K - $1M. These are elections decided by only a few thousand votes in towns most people can’t name.

Meta has $65M. In the right primary, a few hundred thousand bucks is the difference between a legislator who asks the tough questions (about new datacenters etc.) and one who doesn’t.

What also makes this different is not just the degree but the convergence of three things that haven’t existed together before: technology being regulated permeates every sector of daily life and our economy simultaneously… and a single corporation can now openly fund both party pipelines at scale and on a local level.

Lobbying influences how legislators vote. This wants to decide who the legislators are before the voting begins.

And they’re not even pretending.

In Texas, the Super PAC “Forge the Future Project With Meta” lists “tech company” as its controlling entity.

Meta created a GOP PAC and a Democratic PAC. They don’t care about party, they only care about whether you vote the way they need you to on AI.

This model was proven 2 years ago when crypto’s Fairshake PAC spent $139M on congressional races. They won 85% of them. Now the AI and Big Tech titans have copied the playbook. Between Meta and a separate $125M network backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Big Tech will deploy $300M+ into the 2026 cycle, with a growing share aimed at local statehouse races, not Congress.

Connecticut has been right in this fight. For 2 years, state Senator James Maroney has pushed SB 2, one of the most comprehensive AI regulation bills any state has attempted. It passed the Senate 32 to 4 and stalled. The state ranks 9th nationally in jobs impacted by AI (insurance, finance, healthcare, higher ed).

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The state needs to be leading on this and not tiptoeing around it because industry might complain. The stakes are way too high.

I keep coming back to the paperwork in Texas: “Forge the Future Project With Meta.” Controlling entity: Meta.

They filed it with the government and it’s sitting in a public database. It’s completely legal.

The problem isn’t Meta. They are acting based on incentives, just like Danny Ainge and tanking.

Citizens United broke campaign finance and nobody fixed it. Now a single corporation can tip a local race that decides who writes the rules on AI.

When leverage is this cheap, the rational actors will always spend big. Your state is next.

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A sports media commentator running for president. President of the United States of America. You’d see the pitch, laugh out loud and move on.

But Robert Costa of CBS News isn’t laughing. He covered Trump’s political rise closer than anyone in the pre-2016 years. He just spent time with Stephen A. Smith and tweeted this:

“Stephen A. Smith is moving closer to a 2028 campaign... spending a few days with him in recent months reminded me of spending a few days with Trump back in 2013-2014. Many laughed at the prospect of a bid. But in an age of celebrity and social media...”

This comp isn’t nothing. Costa was there when Trump was flirting with running in early 2010’s. He saw the media dismiss it, the political pundits ignore it and the public gradually realize it was real. Costa has seen this movie before.

Smith told Costa he’s giving serious thought to running in the 2028 Democratic primary for president. He’s eager to get on that debate stage.

He wants to take 2026 to study up and learn the issues. Then he’ll make the decision. He’s fiscally conservative and socially liberal.

He’s not announcing today, but this is very real.

The early responses have been predictable. The political class is already dismissing him.

We can skip the part where we debate if this is “serious.”

Every presidential cycle, the political class sets the board and decides who gets to play. You need credentials, money, policy papers and more. Then in 2016, a loudmouth reality TV personality blew the gate open on the GOP side.

Trump had no government experience and no policy depth. But he had something else. Something more essential: an audience that already trusted him. People felt like they knew him.

The Democratic Party’s gates have held longer. Superdelegates, institutional endorsements and a media ecosystem that “both sides” everything and polices “seriousness.” But now the party is facing the kind of uncertainty that leaves an opening.

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A traditional candidate enters a political race and then tries to build an audience. Stephen A. Smith already has one.

I believe moderates that feel politically homeless inside the Democratic coalition, but could never stomach moving to the GOP would flock to Stephen A. Smith. He has younger males that consume politics through sports, personality and short form video on social. They’ve been watching him since middle school.

And Stephen A. Smith has something no other candidate in the field will be able to match: two decades as one of the most visible Black media figures in the country, walking into a primary where Black voters are arguably the most decisive bloc.

They powered Obama to 95% support in 2008. There’s no President Joe Biden without Black voters in 2020. When South Carolina votes, Stephen A. Smith won’t need someone to introduce him. He’s been in the room.

15 million social followers, millions of daily television viewers, appearances across media from right, center and left. Stephen A. Smith doesn’t need to build distribution. He has it. That’s the part the political class and the pundits will underestimate.

Here’s what this really is.

I’ve written before about how the algorithm is silently running everything. How Pat McAfee isn’t the power at ESPN, he’s the product. The attention economy has rewired the incentives so that emotional velocity decides what gets distributed and seen.

Stephen A. Smith is the logical end of that process.

The presidency, for better or worse, isn’t just a policy job anymore. It’s a content and communications job. It rewards daily narrative control, the ability to leverage conflict and emotional clarity. It punishes nuance. It punishes boring.

The skills that win a presidential campaign today are the same skills that built Stephen A. Smith’s career: holding attention, generating viral clips and making people feel something on demand.

The political class will dismiss him. They’ll say he has no clue about the issues, he needs more time to study up. But the old barriers to entry are gone, Trump changed everything. What matters now is being the most compelling person on the stage. Making the audience feel like you are the only one who’s not full of it.

Smith understands this at a molecular level. He’s been on the front lines of how our culture has changed over the last two decades. He inherently knows what drives attention and conversation. He knows how to persuade not only on television, but on short form videos that go viral on social media.

He’s lived this world for 20 years, in a system that punishes the forgettable and rewards the heat.

It’s ironic that Jemele Hill got suspended from ESPN in 2017 for sharing political opinions. ESPN drew a hard line. “Stick to sports.”

8 years later, ESPN’s top personality is openly flirting with a presidential run.

There is no line between sports, media and politics anymore. Trump called into the Pat McAfee Show on ESPN and talked politics on air (and lied). Nothing happened, everyone moved on.

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In the old system, you got punished for crossing lanes. In the new system, you get rewarded for it.

Robert Costa’s comp of Stephen A. Smith to Trump in 2013-14 sticks with me. A famous person with a massive platform starts leaning into politics. Costa had a front row seat for the beginning of that story. He then watched everyone dismiss it. And now… he’s saying this feels the same.

There’s a deeper pattern underneath that nobody in politics wants to name or may not understand.

Trump inherently understood how modern attention works. Stephen A. Smith understands audience development and mechanics the way most members of Congress understand fundraising.

Most of the 2028 Democratic presidential candidates will understand that attention matters. They just won’t know how to create it. Most of them don’t have the levers to pull. Stephen A. Smith has been doing it every day for twenty years.

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The system that would’ve stopped this 10 years ago doesn’t exist anymore. Maybe this isn’t a bad thing.

Maybe the Democratic Party needs someone who actually understands how people talk and consume information in 2026. A guy who doesn’t need consultants to coach him for interviews.

I think he can win.

The algorithm doesn’t care about your résumé or endorsements. It only cares about whether you can hold attention.

And holding attention is the one skill Stephen A. Smith has mastered over his entire career.

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I woke up early in the morning and saw it on my phone. I was half-awake, scrolling the way I always do, bracing for whatever it was going to be. I paused for a second and did that quiet exhale you train yourself to do early in the morning so you don’t start the day on a bad note. The reaction bothered me more than the post itself. This is what’s changed.

I keep hearing “TDS” (Trump Derangement Syndrome) being thrown around like it’s an own and ending the conversation. As if the problem is people noticing instead of the things themselves. It’s a shortcut, a cheat to reframe behavior that would have been disqualifying not that long ago. Now they act like only unserious people can object to it.

Ten years ago, this story would’ve dominated everything. People weren’t more moral back then, there were just clearer lines. You could cross them but you would pay a price. Now it moves through this meta system: screenshot, engagement, debate over reactions, counterdebate about hypersensitivity... then it’s gone.

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The social feeds refresh, the news cycle moves on, people stop paying attention.

The behavior isn’t the issue anymore. The problem is how quickly it’s normalized.

This is what Donald J. Trump understands instinctively. It’s more mechanical than ideological. He doesn’t care if the content or message is defensible. He only cares whether it travels and goes viral. If you haven’t noticed, the reaction becomes the story. The reaction to the reaction becomes the rebuttal. Accountability gets diluted along the way and people are forced into their tribal corners.

Just in the last month, you’ve seen this with Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

David Foster Wallace wrote about this in the 1990s. Not specifically about politics, but about the environment underneath it... a world where content is king and constant noise dulls any signals you want to register.

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This isn’t outrage fatigue. It’s worse. It’s a numbness that starts to feel normal.

We’re not angry. Not shocked (anymore). We’re... adjusted to the new reality.

Americans used to talk and think about the presidency as something set apart. We referred to the bully pulpit and the weight of the job. Now it’s just another troll account. Another piece of content looking for attention.

Zooming out, I don’t think the internet created this. But it certainly set perfect conditions for this to grow.

The part that sticks with me the most isn’t the sheer ugliness of the post. It’s how normal it feels. How it quickly became something you can scroll past on the way to another post.

And this part doesn’t feel normal.

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The police in your hometown would’ve handled it properly.

If you support gun rights, this should hit home. A man with a permit to carry was killed on the street by federal agents. Where’s the “don’t tread on me” energy?

If you support law and order, there’s none of that here. Real law enforcement keeps the community safe, targeting violent criminals, not American citizens.

The surge of ICE agents, questions about training and no accountability are turning residential neighborhoods into battlefields.

THIS IS NOT A PARTISAN ISSUE. This is about whether Americans should be shot dead like this in our own cities. Your town or city could be next.

We need to come together across all political persuasions and demand accountability.

Call your federal representatives and talk to your neighbors. We are Americans. This stuff cannot happen here.

Enough is enough.

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We’ve been trained to think about energy as something that happens to us. The weather changes, markets swing and prices go up. There’s nothing we can do.

The energy problem in Connecticut actually isn’t that complicated. What is complicated is how hard we work to avoid the parts of it that can be fixed.

The conversation is always around volatility and never around structure. We love debating why relief doesn’t stick and why the same folks keep paying no matter what the state does on the margins.

But it’s very simple. The answer to this problem starts with the monopoly model.

When you have a system where one company controls delivery, competition is limited and profits are protected through regulated returns, there will never be pressure to lower costs.

We have a system where pressure is applied to manage optics. The rising costs move straight to the customers. And as I mentioned in my last post, the “relief” evaporates on contact due to increased energy prices.

This is exactly how the system is supposed to work.

This is why people want to turn Eversource into a cartoon villain. It’s not a crazy thought but it’s incomplete.

Eversource isn’t misbehaving in a novel way. It’s operating in a world of incentives that reward cost pass-through and protect upside. I’m not giving them a pass, but it explains why outrage alone will never change the outcome.

But once you see this, the frustrating part isn’t how hard it will be to fix this mess. It’s how many solutions we refuse to look at.

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One obvious place to start is removing the profit model itself. Right now, we guarantee returns based on infrastructure spending but ignore the outcomes. High costs don’t threaten this business model, It justifies it.

Profits should be linked to performance instead. Lower rates, more reliability and real cost containment. We do this and corporate behavior will change fast. We can’t continue to reward spending.

We currently treat energy like an Amex card. Borrowing money to smooth bills doesn’t lower future costs. It just spreads pain over time. We’re paying for electricity that was already used instead of investing in systems that could actually fix our issues.

Go for the jugular. Let’s think big.

We also have the delivery and supply relationship tied together. It limits any leverage the state and customers have against big business. Towns like Wallingford own their infrastructure and have power in the market. It’s not ideology, it’s being smart. Ownership shifts how risk is shared and how big decisions get made.

Fuel access is another big issue that people seem afraid to touch. Connecticut is heavily reliant on natural gas for electricity, particularly in the winter. Meanwhile, we’ve spent years limiting infrastructure that would help boost supply: pipelines, more storage and import capacity, while keeping demand exactly the same.

And lastly, there’s smart regulation. If regulators are publicly saying that a utility has “management issues,” there needs to be dire consequences. Customers are sick of absorbing the hit, while shareholders are insulated (Eversource’s stock is +21% over the last year). This is a choice.

We don’t need a miracle to fix this. We have a menu of options: structural, fiscal and regulatory. The state has to shift risk away from families and back toward the systems that profit from of this chaotic system.

If nothing changes, bills will continue to go up. The state will continue borrowing and people will get more pissed. We can’t afford for trust to continue to erode.

And we keep having this talk every winter like it’s brand new.

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In August, the state approved a plan to borrow $155M to lower the “Public Benefits” charge on our bills. This charge covers energy programs and past policy costs. The promise was around $9-10 off each monthly bill. The relief started showing up in the fall. My Public Benefits line this month was $79+, about $9 lower than it was before the bond plan started.

My total bill still went up.

Then I got to the line that actually decides what you pay. It’s the part of the bill the state didn’t touch.

That’s called the standard supply rate and it moves with energy prices.

Supply prices are set by the market. How customers are exposed to those swings depends on how Eversource runs their business.

Eversource raised supply rates to 12.64 cents per kWh on January 1, up from around 9.75 cents over the summer, roughly a 30% jump tied to winter energy prices.

And for customers like me, using more energy in the winter, this jump wiped out the “relief” and more.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Connecticut, customers of United Illuminating saw their bills drop by around 4% this winter. Their supply rate went up (to 13.70¢/kWh) but their rates didn’t spike the way Eversource’s did, so customers didn’t feel the same hit.

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Eversource is facing the same regional pressures as United Illuminating. Yet it’s Eversource customers who keep getting the biggest bill increases.

In November, PURA (the regulator), cut Yankee Gas’s (part of Eversource) profit margin. They don’t do that lightly. They did it because of “performance and management issues.” They’re saying Eversource has a management problem.

When costs rise, customers absorb it. But when relief comes, it lands somewhere else. This pisses me off. Because we, the customers, end up paying for it.

If a relief plan can’t survive contact with a utility bill, it’s not relief.

The state borrowed $155M to save around $9 a month on one little line on our monthly bills. It never touches the part of the bill that swings. Eversource’s supply rates rose anyway which wiped out the savings immediately.

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We’re now taking out a 20 year loan to pay for electricity we used last year. This doesn’t protect us from market volatility or lower future bills. It smooths over spikes in a world where Eversource controls most of the outcome.

When prices rise, Eversource passes them straight through and calls it normal.

I’m not an energy expert. I looked into this closer because no one was explaining it clearly. It didn’t make sense. Once you look closer, it still doesn’t add up.

I’m going to keep following this topic and tracking how Eversource’s moves show up on our bills.

If you saw something similar on your bill, send it. Maybe there’s a pattern. Let’s compare receipts.

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He called it “the New Dumb,” writing about it for ESPN during the chaos that was the 2000 election.

The concept…it wasn’t ignorance, but something way worse. An overwhelming confidence, a cockiness, that no longer depends on truly understanding something. A certainty not obligated to explain itself.

Dan Carlin mentioned it recently and it stuck with me. Then Minnesota happened.

On January 7 in Minneapolis, Renee Nicole Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent. She was 37, a U.S. citizen, a mom of three, and a poet.

She was unarmed in her Honda Pilot, with children’s toys still in the car as she lay there lifeless.

Video shows an agent yank her driver-side door. Bodycam footage captured her calm, almost apologetic voice: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” She slowly pulled away, the car turned, and shots were fired. In the bodycam audio, a voice can be heard cursing immediately after. She died in the street.

These are facts.

What happened next is where things broke. Within hours, Kristi Noem and Donald Trump called it “domestic terrorism.” They didn’t carefully review evidence, but deployed the phrase immediately as if following a playbook. All before the evidence could be examined.

But more footage came out. For many people, the picture sharpened. She wasn’t armed or trying to hurt the officer. He fired as the car veered away from him.

Other people didn’t see it.

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This is the part worth focusing on. The evidence didn’t confuse things, it clarified them. And yet it failed to change minds. Not because the facts were unavailable or hard to attain (i.e. the videos), but because they got in the way of conclusions that had already been reached.

There was a time when video could act as a referee. Imperfect and incomplete, but still capable of forcing a reckoning.

If this had happened a decade ago, there would have been more talk on the right of a “miscommunication,” a “tragedy,” an “unfortunate accident.” Now, a victim is publicly blamed within hours of her death.

The federal response didn’t attempt to persuade. There was no shame or embarrassment. No visible effort to establish the facts. Just: this is what happened.

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Hunter S. Thompson understood the danger of this moment. When disagreement stops mattering because persuasion is no longer the goal. Truth becomes immune to evidence and institutions learn they don’t need to convince anyone anymore. Because the audience they care about already knows how to hold the line.

This is the New Dumb. It isn’t loud or chaotic. It’s confident and obedient. The facts still exist, but they have very little leverage.

For me, the most unsettling part isn’t that this happened in broad daylight and on video. It’s how normal it’s all starting to feel.

Hunter S. Thompson would have recognized this immediately. And he would have been pissed.

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What started as a relatively calm online discussion about a proposed California wealth-tax ballot initiative quickly turned into something else.

The proposal itself is very unlikely to pass (21% chance on Kalshi) but is helpful in sparking a beneficial discussion on income inequality.

And yet the response was immediate and unmistakable.

Donor threats. Mockery. Exit warnings. Tweet pile-ons.

The speed and defensiveness of the reaction said more than the substance of any argument. Power doesn’t react this fast to ideas unless it thinks it has to.

What that reaction revealed, before anyone even got into the policy, is how sheltered many of the most powerful figures in tech have become. They don’t see how closely people outside their world are starting to watch. And how pissed off this audience already is.

For me, this isn’t a fight over taxes. It’s a fight over whether American elites (especially in Silicon Valley) understand how revolutions start… and how they’re avoided.

Ro Khanna’s posture has been notable because he isn’t throwing bombs. He’s been very clear about the nuance needed on this topic. He’s rejected blanket taxes on unrealized gains, which would be insane.

He’s acknowledged the risks of blindly applying wealth taxes to illiquid founders and companies that aren’t profitable. He’s emphasized that innovation is essential, that Silicon Valley is essential to American success and that blunt instruments like a broad wealth tax can be dangerous if not used carefully.

Khanna keeps coming back to the same point: the numbers are not tenable, the anger is very real and ignoring it going forward isn’t a legitimate option.

Khanna invokes FDR and “economic royalists” (as I have on the Driscoll Globe), it’s not for nostalgia purposes. It’s historical literacy.

FDR understood that when inequality gets to a certain level, the question stops being whether reform is perfect and starts being whether it arrives in time.

The wealth tax Khanna talks about isn’t punitive. He calls it an “anti-revolution” tax. It’s releasing the pressure valve. Buying time before the anger gets out of control and becomes unmanageable.

This is much of the part that Silicon Valley elites seem unable (or unwilling) to hear.

Instead of coming to the table and talking about solutions, they’ve resorted to threats. It’s a familiar pattern. People operating at these levels of privilege and insulation often mistake stability for permanence.

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They assume that the systems that launched them will continue to work indefinitely, even as more and more people recognize how unfair these systems are.

What’s missing from the recent backlash is any serious engagement with why the system feels rigged for so many Americans. It’s not just about how much wealth exists, it’s not zero-sum in that sense. It’s about how differently the rules apply once you cross a certain monetary threshold.

For most people, spending cash means earning it first and paying taxes along the way. For those at the very top, it often works differently: vast paper wealth is used as collateral to take out cash. No income is realized and no tax bill arrives.

You can disagree with Khanna’s solutions and still recognize that something has to change.

Not every response from Silicon Valley needs to be purely defensive. Chamath Palihapitiya, the All-In co-host who is certainly not on the left anymore, recently articulated the problem more clearly than his peers.

He didn’t argue that Bernie and the populist left were right on policy. But he argued that the perception gap has grown way too wide to ignore anymore. He brought up the Gilded Age and how titans like Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford understood that visible dividends to society were essential for their businesses to maintain legitimacy.

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This is the bridge that Ro Khanna is standing on now. He’s not attacking innovation but he’s warning that innovation without legitimacy from the public will eventually eat itself.

History hasn’t been subtle about what happens when extreme concentration of wealth combines with extreme anger in the masses.

The folks at the top always believe things will be different this time. They’re always wrong.

Ro Khanna is providing time and space to work this out. Whether anyone with real pull in Silicon Valley will take the olive branch is an open question.

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Instead of acting on this, the homeowner throws the report away. He then paints the house, gets new curtains and tells his family not to worry. He’s putting the house on the market next week. Letting anyone know about the structural issues would be a major distraction.

This is exactly what the DNC is doing by refusing to release the 2024 election autopsy.

You don’t need to be a political junkie to get why this pisses people off. If you’ve worked a real job, paid bills or watched an institution tell you “everything is FINE!” while your gut and experience say otherwise.

Go to any construction site in this country (even in blue states). Talk to ten workers. You’ll be pressed to find two that believe the Democrats actually have their back. Not because they love monopolies, middlemen or any part of the tollbooth economy that constantly squeezes them. It’s because the party doesn’t talk like it knows them, respects them or fights for them. It’s incredibly obvious.

This is the foundation problem. Everything else is paint.

Ken Martin and the DNC say releasing the 2024 election autopsy would be a distraction. They say they’re already “putting the learnings into motion.” They point to a series of off-off year election wins and ask why anyone would want to relitigate the past.

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But they’re missing the point. This isn’t about 2024. It’s about 2026, 2028 and beyond. It’s about understanding why Democrats pay the “Democratic Penalty” … the 10–15 point hit Dem candidates take in swing states the moment a “D” gets attached to their name.

It’s all about messaging, they say. But we’ve seen how the party actually behaves when a candidate doesn’t fit the traditional and approved mold.

A few months ago, party insiders were happy to leak humiliating research about Graham Platner because he doesn’t fit the consultant class’s picture of a US Senate candidate.

The instinct to go after outsiders and protect insiders isn’t an accident. This is how the system is designed to work.

So of course the DNC didn’t want the autopsy public. The report would be good for people like Graham Platner and bad for traditional, establishment Dems. It would force an honest conversation about who the party is listening to and who it isn’t.

It’s the “Rob from Texas” problem.

When I started the Driscoll Globe a few months ago, I wrote about a guy in the New York Times comment section who nailed the party’s crisis better than any $1K-an-hour strategist in DC could do.

His point was very simple: trust is gone. Voters don’t trust Democrats to pick candidates that speak to them and they don’t trust them to stay in the fight when things get tough.

Hiding the 2024 election autopsy proves Rob from Texas right. It tells voters: you’re children. You can’t handle the truth. Keep trusting us.

But they are out of touch. The party is calibrated for intellectuals in Brooklyn and the professional class of donors. It’s not built for the 60-year-old woman without a college degree who decides elections.

The party is more fluent in identity language than economic power. It excels at managing decline more than naming the real villains. This is why this moment is so important. The success of the party in the 2030s is decided now.

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American politics is undergoing a major shift. Old coalitions are breaking and new ones are forming. People feel squeezed, ignored and angry. They see a system that’s benefiting AI, landlords and soon-to-be trillionaires. All while they’re told to be patient and grateful.

Democrats in Congress have a record-low approval around 18%. Fewer than 1 in 6 voters approve of the party’s performance. This isn’t just a messaging issue, it’s a legitimacy problem.

Compare this to FDR in the 1930s. He didn’t respond to the Great Depression by just talking. He didn’t hide reports to preserve harmony (and the party was way more fragmented back then).

He made conflict visible. He called out the “economic royalists.” He empowered people like Thurman Arnold to go after utility monopolies that were bleeding Americans dry.

FDR understood something that today’s party leadership doesn’t get: in moments of upheaval, people don’t want a manager. They want someone who believes enough to fight.

Instead the DNC is choosing short-term comfort over long-term survival. They’re hoping that a few strong election nights, and not being the Republicans, will be enough to hold the coalition together.

Spoiler: it’s not.

You can’t rebuild trust while hiding the truth. You can’t build a 21st-century political coalition if you’re too scared to admit why the last one didn’t work.

You can’t fix a cracked foundation by painting the siding and hope nobody notices the smell from the basement.

The Republicans released an autopsy after the 2012 election. They were off on a lot, which became clear after Donald Trump’s hostile takeover four years later. But at least they had the guts to look at the tape.

If Democrats and the DNC want to win over the long term, the only way forward is honesty. Complete honesty. It’s time to risk discomfort now to avoid a shellacking later.

We can’t afford to have another Donald Trump. The next one will be worse. Have the cajones to release the report. Let’s examine where the rot is and fix it.

Before the house collapses and voters decide they’re done trusting you.

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I genuinely didn’t expect to write that sentence. Piers did something no one else in the media world has been willing or able to do. He forced Fuentes to own the things he says, in an unexpectedly sharp way that the clever Fuentes couldn’t see coming.

Piers stripped away Fuentes’ online persona and it became obvious there isn’t much underneath it.

The moment that broke through for me wasn’t one of the big viral clips. It was about a memory from Fuentes’ childhood. His origin story. It was about his dad.

Piers went there with zero buildup and zero hesitation.

“You talked about being at Applebee’s and your father saying you shouldn’t eat there because Black people go there. Is that true?”

Fuentes didn’t know what to say. He froze. He was calibrating. He looked like the Donald “Relax Guy” Trump character on South Park trying to buy a few seconds.

“Well… that was just a joke. It wasn’t meant literally.”

Piers didn’t back down.

“You said it came from your father and you laughed about it. So was your father racist?”

A dejected Fuentes responded, “My dad is not a racist. He’s a great man. You’re taking it out of context.”

The panic on his face was crystal clear. He knew why Piers brought this up. It’s Fuentes’ origin story of his worldview. It’s why he says most Black people should be in jail or that organized Jewry is secretly running the world. It’s likely this guy grew up constantly hearing this crap from his family.

Fuentes says they’re “family jokes,” lines crossed for humor’s sake… It’s all a joke, relax, he’ll say.

His entire ideology is built on this foundation, and he’s spent the last decade pretending it’s intellectual discovery.

The Piers Morgan interview exposed how thin the mirage is. It also showed how badly the media has struggled to cover someone like Fuentes. Tucker Carlson spent an hour kissing Fuentes’ ass in a bid to curry favor with the Groypers.

Piers didn’t. He understands how the media works in 2025. He knows the attention game and how to communicate with internet figures.

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He didn’t debate Fuentes, he just kept him grounded in reality long enough for the insanity to show.

Another layer emerged this week. It’s come out that Fuentes’ online rise was amplified by foreign actors who want Americans to hate each other. He’s definitely popular but the scale was inflated.

It makes the whole thing way less real. He really is a lost 15-year-old boy in a 27-year-old man’s body. Nick Fuentes needs to grow up.

Fuentes has never emotionally grown since the moment he first found his audience as a teen. He’s smart, well-read and quick on camera. But his juice comes from his ability to flaunt his resentments in his livestream performances. It gets a reaction every time and he knows what buttons to push.

The Fuentes father story shows where this vitriol comes from. Piers Morgan knew this and it became clear to me immediately. His reaction made him look like a troubled, immature kid who never figured out how to be anyone else.

Nick Fuentes is a scared little boy underneath all that swagger. Piers Morgan somehow became the first person to make him look like one.

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